Editorial: Ontario’s problem is captain, not crew

We aren’t going to pick apart Premier Kathleen Wynne’s pre-election cabinet shuffle because the problem with the Liberal Titanic is the captain, not the crew.

With less than five months to go before the Ontario election which must be called no later than June 7, Wynne mainly promoted women MPPs either into more senior cabinet posts, or from the backbenches into cabinet.

Given the number of cabinet veterans who have announced they won’t run in the next election, this is a sure sign of a Liberal government that, after 15 years in power, is dragging a boatload of baggage behind it in the form of scandals and wasteful spending.

In any event, the key position in cabinet next to the premier is the finance minister.

The fact happy warrior Charles Sousa — who delivers Liberal budgets in the manner of a used car salesman — remains in the finance portfolio, indicates Wynne’s shuffle was about form, not substance.

It is based on election considerations such as increasing the profiles of Liberal MPPs facing tough re-election fights, rather than signalling any change in Wynne’s policies.

The premier is running for re-election on a platform that argues there is such a thing as a free lunch.

That a government that has become, under the Liberals, the most indebted sub-­sovereign borrower in the world, can offer discounted electricity and almost every other political goody one can imagine, without the adverse economic consequences that are the inevitable result of runaway debt.

Wynne claims to have balanced the budget this year while the auditor general and Financial Accountability Office maintain the actual deficit is $4 billion to $4.5 billion, consistent with reckless Liberal spending every since they first came to power under Dalton McGuinty in 2003.

At that time the provincial debt was $138.8 billion. Today, its $312 billion, an increase of almost 125 per cent and a permanent anchor on Ontario’s economy, which, while it’s performing better these days along with the rest of North America, has a long way to go to recover from a lost decade of Liberal overspending, incompetence, waste and political corruption.

Re-electing Wynne will just bring Ontarians more of the same, no matter how many times she shuffles her cabinet.